Garrison Mueller

Student: Garrison Mueller

Project: Computational Fluid Dynamic Model

View: Research Poster (PDF)

Institution: Lafayette College

Major: Civil Engineering

Advisor: Leena Shevade

Abstract

NYC has built thousands of bioswales to retain and detain stormwater in a sustainable way. Only a few of these are monitored to evaluate their effectiveness due to various reasons such as funding and other practical difficulties in monitoring. Thus, modeling is a widely adopted option to scale up these monitoring results to inform design changes. This poster presents the method and the initial results of a three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model developed replicating physical and boundary conditions of a constructed bioswales inlet in New York City. The inlet with the catch basin is connected to the bioswale using a horizontal pipe attached to a riser pipe that is open at both ends. The top of the riser pipe is open to the atmosphere and the bottom is inserted into the soil. The outflow from bottom is restricted by the infiltration rate of the engineered soil. The flow through this connection is difficult to measure as the horizontal pipe is submerged on upstream as well as downstream. Thus, a weir cannot be used to measure inflow. The model was validated using data collected through a field experiment conducted to study the hydraulics of stormwater flow. We are working on analyzing the effect of the inlet pipe diameter on the modeled flow rate into the bioswale. The computational results showed that the larger connection diameter significantly increased the flow through the top outlet increasing distribution of flow over the bioswale area.